The Invention of Disaster

Power and Knowledge in Discourses on Hazard and Vulnerability

JC Gaillard

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781317617327
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

This theoretical contribution argues that the domination of Western knowledge in disaster scholarship has allowed normative policies and practices of disaster risk reduction to be imposed all over the world. It takes a postcolonial approach to unpack why scholars claim that disasters are social constructs while offering little but theories, concepts and methods supposed to be universal in understanding the unique and diverse experiences of millions of people across very different cultures. It further challenges forms of governments inherited from the Enlightenment that have been rolled out as standard and ultimate solutions to reduce the risk of disaster. Ultimately, the book encourages the emergence of a more diverse set of world views/senses and ways of knowing for both studying disasters and informing policy and practice of disaster risk reduction. Such pluralism is essential to better reflect local realities of what disasters actually are around the world.

This book is an essential read for scholars and postgraduate students interested in disaster studies as well as policy-makers and practitioners of disaster risk reduction.

1 What is a disaster?

DOI: 10.4324/9781315752167-1

What is a disaster? This question has puzzled generations of researchers across fields and disciplines, none of whom has been able to offer any consensual definition (Quarantelli, 1998; Perry and Quarantelli, 2005). This book is not yet another attempt at answering this question, which is, to our view, an aporia. All definitions in a broad and eclectic field of scholarship such as disaster studies will always reflect disciplinary assumptions and objectives that researchers carry with them when engaging with the concept of disaster. On the other hand, nor does this book endeavour to throw the concept of disaster out of the window. As Derrida (1967a, p. 25) once said, ‘nous devons d’autant moins renoncer à ces concepts qui nous sont indispensables pour ébranler aujourd’hui l’héritage dont ils font partie’¹.

Rather, this book questions how and why we ask what a disaster is in the first place. It also explores what such questioning entails in terms of scholarship and the approaches we design in attempting to reduce disaster risk. As such, this book is inevitably an endeavour of deconstruction, as in Derrida’s (2004a, p. 1100) own words:

c’est une pensée de l’origine et des limites de la question “qu’est-ce que?...”, la question qui domine toute l’histoire de la philosophie. Chaque fois que l’on essaie de penser la possibilité du “qu’est-ce que?...”, de poser une question sur cette forme de question, ou de s’interroger sur la nécessité de ce langage dans une certaine langue, une certaine tradition, etc., ce qu’on fait à ce moment-là ne se prête que jusqu’à un certain point à la question “qu’est-ce que?”. C’est ça, la différence de la déconstruction. Elle est en effet une interrogation sur tout ce qui est plus qu’une interrogation.²

Our interrogation focuses on the ontological, epistemological and ideological foundations that underpin disaster studies and disaster risk reduction as entangled fields of scholarship, policy and action that have gained considerable and worldwide traction over the past hundred years, since at least Samuel Prince’s PhD 1920 thesis on the Halifax disaster. We particularly explore the universal relevance and influence of a concept of Latin etymology and how this concept, alongside some of its cognates (hazard, vulnerability, resilience, capacities, etc.), has informed policies and actions in places where they do not translate or even make sense. Therefore, asking what a disaster is is more than a definitional question. It requires the exploration of knowledge and power structures in disaster studies and disaster risk reduction. What and whom do we study? And why? Who does the studying? Where? And from which perspectives? How does knowledge generated by researchers sustain policies and actions? Ultimately, how do disaster scholarship and disaster risk reduction initiatives contribute to sustain a broader ideology that shapes the world we know today?

As such, this book endorses Foucault’s (1969b) call to challenge what is taken for granted in our interpretations of the world and it unpacks processes that have led to these interpretations. In disaster studies, answering this call entails confronting the Eurocentric/Western ontological and epistemological heritage of the Enlightenment and how it has sustained the imperialist and ethnocentric ideology promoted by the West. Our argument is that the hegemony of Western knowledge in disaster studies supports normative and standardised disaster risk reduction policies and actions, which in many instances fail to consider the diverse realities of very different local contexts around the world.

Power and knowledge

This book is therefore about power and knowledge in disaster. Our approach to power owes a debt to both Foucault (1975, 1976) and Gramsci (1971), although we recognise that there are other, dissonant perspectives (see Lukes, 2005 and Morriss, 2002 for recent overviews). To both Foucault and Gramsci, power is not a thing that emanates from particular institutions, individuals or sets of actions at a macro or superstructural level that is imposed on others. Power is about unequal relationships that allow some institutions and individuals to guide and control the behaviours of others (Foucault, 1976, 1982). As such, power is embedded in time and space, within all dimensions of society and the everyday lives of people from the state level as much as within families. It is therefore concomitant to other forms of economic, political and interpersonal relationships that bind the social fabric.

The exercise of power may be coercive and tangible or more subtle, invisible, and based on consent. Traditional views of power have long considered power relations as direct, from A over B (Bachrach and Baratz, 1962; Dahl, 1957). Yet the exercise of power is also indirect, multi-nodal, fluid, mobile and engrained within policies, regulations, institutions, literature and the arts as well as architecture and infrastructure such as schools, workshops, hospitals, prisons and museums that shape the everyday lives of people and subjectify them to the will and control of those in power (Althusser, 1975; Foucault, 1982). In a seminal definition, Foucault (1976, pp. 122–123) summarises:

le pouvoir est partout; ce n’est pas qu’il englobe tout, c’est qu’il vient de partout. (…) Ce n’est pas une institution, et ce n’est pas une structure, ce n'est pas une certaine puissance dont certains seraient dotés: c’est le nom qu'on prête à une situation stratégique complexe dans une société donnée³.

Power is also internalised and mediated by the psyche (Butler, 1997). As such, power is exercised beyond the realm of the sole political. Gramsci (1930, 1971) actually locates power in the cultural sphere and associates its exercise with intellectuals such as teachers, religious figures and journalists who critically contribute to spreading dominant ideas. For Gramsci and Althusser (1975), the exercise of power as a mechanism of control and subjection is therefore inherently ideological.

Exercising power has to be justified by a dominant form of knowledge that is considered and presented as truth by those whose aim is to guide and control the behaviour of others (Foucault, 1975, 1976). Exercising power requires a fine knowledge and close monitoring of those whose behaviour is to be guided and controlled. In Western societies, power relies upon scientific knowledge as an expression of truth or reason and state or institutional knowledge (i.e. statistics as a means of control and normalisation of people’s behaviour). Power and knowledge therefore are intimately linked to each other in all dimensions of the social fabric and everyday life. They are ‘synonymous’, to quote Horkheimer and Adorno (1947).

Power and knowledge come together through discourses (Foucault, 1976). Foucault (1969b, p. 148) defines a discourse as ‘ensemble des énoncés qui relèvent d’un même système de formation’, which entails that they have emerged through the same frame at a given time and are structured through common concepts and strategies to serve a similar function. Discourses therefore are performative in the sense that they enact power (Butler, 1993). Their reiterative nature contributes to producing the effects that they name, regulate and constrain as well as to imposing dominant forms of knowledge and the interpretation of objects and phenomena through multiple channels, policies, institutions, media, forms of architecture, and so on. As such, discourses contribute to the social existence and significance of these particular objects and phenomena, including those we call natural hazards and disasters. Laclau and Mouffe (2001, p. 108) famously reflected on the relevance of discourses in the social construction of earthquakes:

An earthquake or the falling of a brick is an event that certainly exists, in the sense that it occurs here and now, independently of my will. But whether their specificity as objects is constructed in terms of ‘natural phenomena’ or ‘expressions of the wrath of God’, depends upon the structuring of a discursive field. What is denied is not that such objects exist externally to thought, but the rather different assertion that they could constitute themselves as objects outside any discursive condition of emergence.

It is important to note, though, that it is not our intention to deny the material existence of natural phenomena such as earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, cyclones or floods. Our point is that it is through particular discourses, and the underpinning influence of specific forms of knowledge, that, in some societies, these natural phenomena are interpreted as hazards and elsewhere as resources or retributions for whatever misconduct. It is therefore not the concepts, per se, that stir our attention in this book, but rather the interpretation and translation of particular objects and phenomena into these concepts and how these concepts hence reflect the view of those who use them more than that of those who are directly confronted by them, if the former and the latter are not the same individuals.

In Foucault’s approach to power, scientific knowledge and associated narratives, discourses, policies, regulations, institutions as well as forms of architecture and infrastructure are gathered within dispositifs. Foucault defines a dispositif as follows:

un ensemble résolument hétérogène, comportant des discours, des institutions, des aménagements architecturaux, des décisions règlementaires, des énoncés scientifiques, des propositions philosophiques, bref, du dit, aussi bien que du non-dit, voilà les éléments du dispositif. Le dispositif lui-même, c’est le réseau qu’on peut établir entre ces éléments. (…) une sorte – disons – de formation, qui, à un moment historique donné, a eu pour fonction majeure de répondre à une urgence. Le dispositif a donc une fonction stratégique dominante.⁴

(Foucault et al., 1977, p. 63)

Power is, however, not all about control and domination. The exercise of power also triggers resistance and may be enabling for some actors and organisations. Resistance may take multiple forms, including contre conduites (Foucault, 2004a), war of position (Gramsci, 1971), everyday techniques and means of class struggle (Scott, 1985, 1990), creative tactics to reinterpret and reappropriate strategies and methods of control (de Certeau, 1980), counter-insurgency strategies (Hardt and Negri, 2004), civil society networks and advocacy (e.g. a genuine approach to participation) (Bello, 2001; Norton and Gibson, 2019), hybridization of knowledge and practices (Bhabha, 1994) and even collaboration (Guha, 1997).

Notwithstanding differences in their expression and materialisation, these diverse forms of resistance are all embedded within relationships of power yet not as the other end of a binary relationship (Foucault, 1976). Because power is everywhere, often invisible and embedded within the everyday social fabric, so are the different forms of resistance. Relations of power and resistance thus appear as a field of diffuse forces exercised from both the top down and the bottom up.

Unpacking the intrinsic relationship between power and knowledge in disaster requires us to focus on how knowledge on disaster is created and embedded within particular discourses that are shared and imposed through a sophisticated dispositif. It necessitates an understanding of how this knowledge and the discourses it underpins sustain strategies of disaster risk reduction that are designed by certain actors and imposed upon, or resisted by, people who are considered at risk and whose responses and behaviours are to be guided or controlled (or both). Our objective is therefore epistemological in nature but necessarily requires us to explore the ontological assumptions that underpin our ways of knowing and the ideology the latter supports.

Understanding disaster and the Enlightenment legacy

At the crux of this exploration is the ontological assumption that disasters, at least those associated with natural phenomena, sit within the nature–culture binary or, in the disaster studies jargon, between hazard and vulnerability. Indeed, it is widely acknowledged, if not taken for granted, that the concept of disaster captures harm and damage caused when a hazardous phenomenon affects vulnerable people and their livelihoods. This ontological assumption can be traced back to the eighteenth century, as emphasised in the famous dialogue between Voltaire and Rousseau following the 1755 Lisbon earthquake, eventually dubbed the first modern disaster (Dynes, 2000).

As such, modern understandings of disaster are firmly grounded in a broader legacy of the Enlightenment, or Age of Reason that Kant (1784) famously summarised as follows:

Aufklärung ist der Ausgang des Menschen aus seiner selbstverschuldeten Unmündigkeit. Unmündigkeit ist das Unvermögen, sich seines Verstandes ohne Leitung eines anderen zu bedienen. Selbstverschuldet ist diese Unmündigkeit, wenn die Ursache derselben nicht am Mangel des Verstandes, sondern der Entschließung und des Mutes liegt, sich seiner ohne Leitung eines andern zu bedienen. Sapere aude! Habe Mut, dich deines eigenen Verstandes zu bedienen! ist also der Wahlspruch der Aufklärung.⁵

Ausgang here includes freedom, or emancipation, from the hazards of nature that the 1755 earthquake made pressing. Rousseau’s (1967) interrogation on the causes of the disaster indeed marks the transition from a representation of disasters through the lens of natural phenomena and their previously evident impact – such as in Defoe’s (1704)The Storm or in the different entries listed in Chambers’s Cyclopaedia and Diderot and D’Alembert’s Encyclopédie – to a questioning of explanations in their historical dimension about the development of the city of Lisbon in a way that made it vulnerable to an earthquake.

In fact, Kant himself, who once blamed God’s will (1755), would eventually revisit his view on the impact of earthquakes and other natural phenomena to state that ‘er der Vorsehung wegen der Übel, die ihn drücken, keine Schuld geben müsse (…) sich also von allen Übeln, die aus dem Mißbrauche seiner Vernunft entspringen, die Schuld gänzlich selbst beizumessen habe’⁶ (Kant, 1786, p. 123). This increasing concern for the causes of disasters, e...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsement Page
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Foreword
• Preface
• 1 What is a disaster?
• 2 A genealogy of disaster studies
• 3 Unfulfilled promise of a paradigm shift
• 4 The quest for pantometry
• 5 The governmentality of disaster
• 6 Climate change and the ultimate challenge of modernity
• 7 Exclusive inclusion and the imperative of participation
• 8 Gender in disaster beyond men and women
• 9 Power and resistance in disaster risk reduction
• 10 The invention of disaster
• 11 Postscript Where to from here?
• References
• Index